Category: Guest Posting

I have been wanting to put up a guest post for some time, and finally I have one that is worth sharing. Originally posted on Medium, this piece by Gabriel Iosa precisely mirrors the things that concern me about how people are raising their children these days, exposing them to social media from birth, and substituting devices for actual communication and interaction with their kids. The result is what we are witnessing in rapidly growing trends among young people of de-personalization, alienation, depression, suicide, violence, and other social and mental ailments. You can visit the author’s web site at www.gabrieliosa.com.

Complete lack of privacy, iPad addiction and mental struggles from an early age are the ingredients of a hard adult life

The online life of the new generation starts early, way before the actual life of the newborn begins. Pictures of the mother and her big belly, wandering around in a forest or at the hospital, waiting for her son or daughter to come out into the world are spread online on Facebook and Instagram like wildfire. Even the moment of birth is captured on camera, from the womb all the way out into the hospital delivery room.

The minute they come out of their moms, newborn babies are online. Their first picture on Facebook is live in about 60 minutes after birth. The baby is not even considered a legal person yet, has no legal name and all of the gist, but he or she is already on social media, getting likes and comments from people that care little about them, but consider it to be the social norm to felicitate the parents for their achievement and for the fact that they posted the whole thing online. And fast!

“Pictures of newborns appear online within an hour of birth. Of the parents surveyed, the average time it took to share their newborns’ first photo on a social media site was 57.9 minutes. They surveyed 2,367 parents of kids 5 and under. Seventy-seven percent of baby photos appear on the parents’ Facebook page, with Instagram trailing behind at 48 percent” — Huffington Post

Between 3 to 14 days later, they have their first professional photo shoot. I’m not talking phone cameras and a toy that the mom dangles in front of him and then the baby laughs and gets photographed for the family album. I’m talking two photographers, costume changes, sets, scenes, lights and so on. The whole thing lasts for hours and the results are immediately posted on the internet, with parents having no clues about the consequences.

Their first walk, which was once a private, emotional and unforgettable moment, sometimes captured on an old camera that barely worked is now rather transmitted live on Facebook or Instagram, or simply recorded and then posted online, losing its spiritual, private values but being available online immediately for everyone to see and like, for some reason.

For the first birthday of the child, the whole thing goes off the charts. Photographers, camera guys, drones, a huge buffet and even live bands celebrate the event in front of friends and family, and the whole thing is posted on Facebook as it happens.

The first bath of the baby, the first burp, the first caroling, first haircut, the first trip to the store and the first laugh crisis, they’re all posted online by the parents, some hoping that they’ll go viral probably, as if the only reason for that baby being alive is to gather as many likes and shares and comments as humanly possible.

But it doesn’t end here. No, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only that kid has absolutely no privacy, probably the hardest thing to get as a kid or a person in today’s world, from the second he takes his first breath onwards, but he gets his own Facebook or Instagram account, with his own smartphone or tablet at age 2 or 3. That’s when I started walking, and now kids that age are already developing an addiction to games and social media, as they see their parents are doing. There’s even a Messenger for Kids app now.

“ I opened my eyes to find our three-year-old, William, standing at the bedside table in his pyjamas. He pulled the duvet, to make sure I was awake, then grabbed my hand.

‘Daddy,’ he announced, with a sense of urgency in his little voice. ‘I need the iPad.’

I checked my watch, stumbled to my feet, and marched him back to his room.

‘You don’t need the iPad,’ I told William, tucking him back into bed. ‘You need to lie down and go to sleep. It’s the middle of the night.’

At 7am, my alarm clock rang. Getting out of bed, I noticed something amiss: the white iPad, which I had left to charge overnight on the sofa next to our bed, had vanished.

I walked to the sitting room. There sat William, cross-legged on the floor, with the stolen device in his hands. He was playing a noisy video game called Peppa Pig’s Puddle Jump. The battery was already half empty, suggesting he’d been using it for at least two hours” — Daily Mail

By age 4, they’re spending hours upon hours in front of a huge, LED screen TV watching brainwashing Youtube videos generated by an algorithm, singing along and “learning” about the alphabet and colours from monstrous-looking creatures that hop around and dance on rhythmic music. It looks cute, the scene is “Facebook material”, but in reality, it’s life-altering.

“These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place. To expose children to this content is abuse.

We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here.

What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal” — Medium

By age 7, the child has his first dizziness crisis, the first heart palpitations and the first panic attacks. You read that right, more and more toddlers have severe anxiety disorders because they’re never going out, never playing on the playground and never having normal social interactions, but just staying indoors with an iPad and a PlayStation controller hooked around their arms.

“While that result set might not be surprising in the teen search rankings, it’s interesting to note that “porn” ranks fourth in the “seven and under” category, receiving more searches than “Club Penguin” and “Webkinz.” Meanwhile, “sex” is fourth for teens and tweens alike. Facebook, YouTube and Google take the other top spots.

The data was compiled from 14.6 million searches made using Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton, which lets parents track their kids’ online activity. And while Symantec is almost certainly hoping to sell more software as a result, it’s also a timely reminder that kids are growing up fast these days” — Mashable

Comes age 10, and the kid is already searching online for porn and sex, and by age 12, he’s most likely had it’s first intimate contact, regardless of its form. By age 14, most children have already lost their virginity and are in their second or third intimate relationship. Their lives are all online, with great moments, love deceptions, depression episodes and everything else posted on Facebook as they happened.

When finally reaching the supposed maturity at ages 16 to 18, the children are suffering from a disorder in the anxiety, depression or phobias sector. There’s no privacy for them, there are no social connections that are stable and valued enough, but just internet and more internet, Facebook and more Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and Netflix and so on. Instead of being out and getting their heart broken in the real world, kids are so sensitive that even an SMS text can drive them into suicide.

“Messages that are delivered electronically are very powerful,” said Barbara Greenberg, a teen, adolescent and child psychologist. “Kids aren’t aware of how powerful their messages are and how their messages might impact others.”

Key issues that trip up texting teens include expecting their messages not to be seen by other friends, parents and potentially the police; misinterpreting the tone of messages; and navigating peer pressure and other coming-of-age hurdles, experts told journalists” — CNN

Parents are doing parenting wrong. Some of them even go way too far with posting everything that they do on Facebook (WARNING: Disturbing Content) and it takes a lot of time even for Facebook to stop the spreading of some of the acts that are unspeakable but are still posted online.

There’s no doubt about it that putting the entire life of the child online from the moment of birth all the way into toddlery, and then letting the kid himself do it afterwards and continue using technology from an early age into teenagery is causing the now adult, 18-year-old or older person a series of problems that take years or even a lifetime to cure. Some of them are unfortunately life-lasting, and there’s nothing parents can do about them.

The only way from stopping the new generation from becoming the Facebook addicted, anxious and depressive, medicated population of tomorrow, which is happening as we speak, is by stopping doing parenting in the wrongest way possible. No more newborn photos online. No more Facebook Live’s.

No more iPads and video game consoles for toddlers. No more weird cartoons. No more expensive laptops for 12-year-old kids. No more total freedom for them to go and use the internet whenever they want, as much as they want and how they want.

Do some “bad” now, but think of the better good. Enjoy your healthy kid and see him grow as a normal person, not a privacy-deprived, mentally exhausted, brainwashed and scared teenager who, turning into adulthood, has no taste of the real world, but only for the virtual one, which provides him with no food, no clothes, no money for rent, no human contact and no mental stability.

Bringing a baby into the world is the most beautiful gift any two people can receive in life. But if you’re not sure that you’ll be able to dedicate your time and effort into raising that kid well, know how to do it and be financially and mentally capable of doing it, just don’t! Use a condom. You are the one who should raise your kid, not Facebook, not video games or cartoons and definitely not medical professionals.